The Guys Behind Diapers.com Are Taking Over Beauty Mag Allure's Site

Allure magazine is refreshing its website with a very strong focus on e-commerce, which will be powered by Amazon-owned Quidsi, which operates sites like Diapers.com and BeautyBar.com.

This is very interesting news for two reasons:

Media and commerce are becoming ever more tightly interwoven. This is an ongoing trend, especially on the internet, but a Condé Nast magazine turning its online presence into a primarily e-commerce focused is significant.

A lot of people will certainly treat this commingling of media and commerce with suspicion. But media is a vehicle to sell things--it's a vehicle for advertising, but advertising exists because it sells things. If a magazine story entices someone to buy something, then that media publication should be compensated for generating that purchasing intent. And no, that wouldn't necessarily mean that all newspapers would start pushing product down people's throats, because if they started doing that their readers would eventually desert them.